They called “class rush.” At sunset, the freshmen rallied in one place, the sophomores in another. It happened every September before classes began. Everyone carried ropes, wrapped around their waists, so they could tie their prisoners. Once it was dark, so dark no one could see who did what to whom, they attacked each other; packs of freshmen, gangs of sophomores; a mob of five hundred boys. The girls stayed inside, crowded around the windows of their dorms. The boys chased each other back and forth across the campus, through the streets of Evanston, down to Fountain Square, then back to the lake. Respectable people stayed inside. Local drunks and toughs joined in.
Whoever captured the other would force them to strip, then tie them up and march them off. If they captured their prisoners by the lake, they’d force them to jump in, or they’d throw them in, or they’d row them out, a few at a time, to a raft or a jetty and leave them there—to untie themselves, swim ashore, find clothes before they were caught again. Worse than being dunked or marooned was to be kidnapped—stripped, tied, taken in a car to the forest outside of town, then left there. The next morning, people driving to work would see boys, wearing nothing but leaves and branches, skittering along the side of the road, trying to get back to campus before registration ended.
Within a day, everyone would be back where he or she belonged—the girls in groups, whispering to each other, carrying their books, dressed in their pretty, bright sweaters; the boys, in their tweeds and twills and flannels, strolling with a swagger, telling war stories, wearing their cuts and bruises like show ribbons.
Convocation always began with a prayer; the school’s president would give a speech; professors would take their first attendance; football practice would start. Soon there’d be Homecoming and a Big Ten home game; the marching band would play “Go U Northwestern,” the whole crowd would roar, “Rise Northwestern! We’ll always stand by you! Rise Northwestern! We’ll sing and cheer for you! Varsity! Varsity! Hit ’em hard and low! Varsity! Varsity! Go Northwestern! Varsity! Rah! Rah!”
The university was less than seventy years old when the twenties began. Methodists had founded the place to minister to the territories of the Northwest. The school had its traditions, but they were as new and as raw as the region. Football, played hard, played “for keeps,” was one of those traditions. So was class rush. Recently, though, rush had begun to change: it had become rougher, rowdier, and tougher—football without pads or helmets.
The rush of 1921 was the wildest anyone could remember: the crowds were smaller, but they were rougher. A sophomore named Persinger showed up at the Evanston police station, escorted by friends. He was dazed and shaken; his friends were angry.
Persinger filed a complaint: four students had kidnapped him from his room at Sigma Nu fraternity. They’d taken him to a cemetery by the lake, tied him to a tombstone, then left him. Hours later, they’d come back, gagged him, blindfolded him, then rowed him out to a breakwater. They’d lashed him to a plank and left him, head down, tipped into the waves. Two fishermen heard his cries, rowed to the rocks, cut him loose, and brought him to shore.
Evanston police contacted the dean of the college. The dean announced a “searching investigation.” Walter Dill Scott, Northwestern’s new president, placed a personal call to Harry Pearsons, Evanston’s mayor. (Scott had just been appointed the year before. Many people had their doubts about him: Scott was a Presbyterian—the first Northwestern president who wasn’t a Methodist. He was also a psychologist—indeed, an eminent psychologist—but the discipline itself was too modern and too secular for some people, faculty and trustees alike. In Scott’s favor: He’d been a student at Northwestern and had taught there. In fact, he’d even been abducted by sophomores during his own class rush.) Scott reminded Pearsons of facts they both knew: Most of Northwestern’s trustees were from Evanston; all of Northwestern’s trustees were sober-minded Methodists. What was good for Northwestern was good for Evanston. Young Persinger’s unfortunate experience had already been reported in the papers. It reflected badly on the school. Couldn’t the police report be modified so that Persinger’s treatment be made to seem less harsh? The mayor understood. He called his chief of police, a man named Leggett, and ordered him to change the report. The chief did what the mayor told him to do.
It took two years for all this—the rush of 1921, Persinger’s ordeal, Scott’s phone call, Pearsons’s order, Leggett’s revisions—to become kindling for a bonfire. That fire broke out in May 1923. It began smoldering the night Persinger was abducted.
That night, a freshman named Leighton Mount disappeared. Tall, slender, sweet-faced, clean-cut. Vanished.
Leighton had gone off to the rush along with everyone else. He’d gone to the rally at the Star Theater, had tied a rope around his waist, and marched in the crowd, from Patten Gymnasium on to campus. That year, freshmen had painted their faces with iodine so they could tell friend from foe. Leighton had had his face painted—just like everyone else. As late as three o’clock that morning people remembered seeing Leighton, remembered talking with him, out on the Lake Street pier.
The sun came up. People limped back to their rooms. Leighton was a local boy. He lived with his family in town. Leighton didn’t come home.
Leighton’s father was a well-to-do traveling man. He’d just left for St. Louis. Leighton’s older sister, Helen, was a student at the University of Illinois. She’d left home to start her own semester. Leighton lived with his mother.
“Leighton was always close to me,” his mother said. “He was a gentle sort of boy. . . . He and I were companions. That’s the main reason he went to Northwestern . . . so we could keep each other company. . . . But Leighton was no sissy . . . he wasn’t afraid of a fight. He went to Sunday school, but he was no molly coddle. He loved music . . . he played in orchestras—but he’d get his hands as dirty as anybody.”
Leighton’s mother remembered the conversation they’d had the afternoon before he disappeared.
“Leighton had been so busy on campus, attending to registration, planning his courses, he wasn’t even home for meals, he was being rushed by the fraternities. . . .
“That afternoon, he had a few hours, so he took me out for a drive. . . . He talked to me more as if I were an older brother than a middle-aged mother. . . . We were so close to each other, as we were talking, that I spoke of many things. I said I knew he was at a dangerous time of life for even the best of boys. . . . I told him, frankly, that many boys grow melancholy. I hinted that they sometimes talked of running away from home—or even planned to commit suicide. . . . I warned him, as a son about to enter college life, to play square, not to do foolish things, and—above all—to take his part. . . .
“I remember, as we drove around the campus, I remember one of the boys—he was nice looking and clean cut—jumped up on the running board of the car as we slowed down. ‘Hey, Mount,’ he shouted. ‘Are you coming out with the bunch tonight? It’s the big night, you know.’
“Leighton was undecided. He told the fellow he wasn’t sure. I told Leighton that I wanted him to get as much as possible out of college life, in friendship and activities as well as studies. I urged him to play the game when the game was worth playing. . . . to be a good sport.
“I knew Leighton had been a real boy. I wanted him to be a real man. And so—I urged him to go to the university class rush. And he went.”1
Leighton’s mother went to the police when he didn’t come home. She went to the station where Persinger’s friends had taken him after he was rescued. The reporters who’d overheard Persinger’s story overheard Mrs. Mount’s.
The “Mount case” made local and then national news. The Chicago Tribune’s headline ran across eight columns of its front page: STUDENT LOST AFTER HAZING. SEARCH LAKE AND WOODS FOR N.U. YOUTH. National news services carried Leighton’s story. Papers, east and west, ran it, half column or full, as a cautionary tale.
Mrs. Mount went to see President Scott. She didn’t know that he’d already called Mayor Pearsons about Arthur Persinger. What she did know about President Scott was what everyone who paid close attention to Northwestern’s new president—its new psychologist—knew and remembered: in October 1920 Scott had given a memorable—some said a groundbreaking—speech to the university’s trustees.
For too long, Scott said, universities had emphasized the teaching of subjects, not students. College men and college women were more than just “candidates for degrees.” They were unique individuals with unique capacities. “Grounded in a profound faith in Christian culture, an appreciation of the laws of nature, and an understanding of . . . technological advance,” Northwestern was ready to lead the way to the new goal of American higher education—the education of the individual, developed to his or her own fullest potential, devoted to a life of service.2
“The individual,” “the individual,” “the individual” were the words everyone remembered. Ninety years ago, those words, spoken with such emphasis, by a college president to his board of trustees, were stirring. Mrs. Mount was sure President Scott would do everything he could to find her boy.
She confided in him.
Leighton had fallen in love, she said. The girl’s name was Doris Fuchs. Doris was very pretty, and very nice—but she wasn’t right for Leighton. She didn’t come from a family like Leighton’s—she worked as a nursemaid (a nanny). And—Doris wasn’t of their faith.
“My boy,” said Mrs. Mount, “told me about Doris. ‘Mom,’ he said. He always called me ‘Mom.’ ‘I’m in love with Doris.’ ” Mrs. Mount said she listened. But then: “I talked to Leighton and I talked to her. . . . I had them both over together. They were both young, I explained. My boy had years of study ahead of him. Miss Fuchs was . . . employed. It would have been hard on both of them to wait years before marriage. My son—oh, I tried to be gentle about it. I wanted to do the right thing—but I had to tell them the difference in their viewpoints. Miss Fuchs was a member of the Christian Science faith. She interested Leighton in it. She stimulated his religious thought. . . . But that was the only common meeting ground between the two, besides their youth. I couldn’t help but see it. I wanted to be fair to her as well as to my boy. And so—I urged them to just be friends, and nothing more.”3
Mrs. Mount said that the night Leighton disappeared, Doris had come to her, very upset. Leighton had written Doris a note—a farewell note, a good-bye note that twice mentioned suicide. Doris said it wasn’t the first time Leighton had talked to her about “getting out of it all.” “Dear Angel,” Leighton had written, “ . . . I swear I am haunted. ‘Mom’ remarked tonight it seems that almost every young person wants to run away from home or commit suicide. . . . Perhaps she is right. . . . Goodbye, love . . . I cannot sign my name; somehow it is hard.”
Mrs. Mount said she began to weep. She wept all night. She feared the worst: When Leighton was very young, only four years old, he’d fallen out of bed and fractured his skull. He still had a scar from the accident. Doctors had warned Mrs. Mount that such an injury at such a young age would have grave consequences. Before Leighton was twenty years old, the doctors said, “he would probably develop a pronounced melancholy nature . . . which would show in some manner.”4 Leighton was now eighteen. The doctors’ predictions were coming true.
Mrs. Mount wept as she confessed all this to President Scott.
Scott recalled the conversation:
“After Mrs. Mount told me this, she asked me to keep it in confidence, which I told her I would do. It seemed to me that Mrs. Mount was very greatly distressed and perturbed—and unclear—in her mind as to what had happened to her son. . . . I felt that Mrs. Mount hoped that Leighton had been carried off by . . . students. She feared he had carried out his threat, but she was doing her best to substantiate her hope that he had been carried off because—if he had been carried off—he would be back. . . .”5
Scott tried to calm her. Class rush had started so late and gone on so long, he said, it was likely that Leighton hadn’t come home—not because of some mishap but because he didn’t want to wake her. “Leighton is probably in class right now,” Scott said. “When class is over, he will probably get home, and you—you had better get home so you can meet him, there.” Many young men talk about suicide, Scott said. “Lots of boys threaten that and don’t do it. I think Leighton will be back.”6
Mrs. Mount asked the president to search the campus. Search the fraternities, search the forest, search the lakeshore, she begged. Scott promised her: Northwestern would do everything she asked.
A day passed.
Leighton’s father returned to Evanston and made an appointment to see Scott. Scott met Mr. Mount in his office—along with the college’s dean and someone Scott called the “university’s publicity man.”
The men talked for an hour. “We made recommendations,” Scott recalled. “We recommended that Mr. Mount employ a detective agency, at once, to shadow Doris Fuchs, and particularly, the mail and telephone and telegraph. I said to Mr. Mount, ‘The boy will first get in touch with the girl. Now, watch the girl.’ ” Scott urged Mr. Mount to tell the detectives to “extend their search to distant cities and particularly the YMCA because Leighton was a YMCA boy.”7
The Mounts hired the Burns Agency. Agents trailed Doris. They investigated her employment and religious affiliations. They sent inquiries to Burns Agency offices in other cities; they followed up leads as far away as North Dakota.
Another day passed. No Leighton.
Two students came to see Scott. One of them was a handsome young man named J. Allan Mills; the freshmen class had elected Mills as one of its leaders when they’d rallied at the Star Theater before class rush began. Mills told Scott that he and his friends believed Leighton had been kidnapped by Chicago newspaper reporters who wanted to bring dishonor on Northwestern. “I heard rumors everyday,” Scott recalled. “I heard rumors that Leighton was seen in St. Louis or in Milwaukee or in Minneapolis or on the South Side, here. . . . I never believed any of the rumors.”8
Four days after Leighton disappeared, Scott met with Mayor Pearsons and Chief of Police Leggett. Leggett had cleaned up many student messes in his day—the Persinger case included. Pearsons had lived through years of class rushes and fraternity hazings. Scott knew Northwestern better than any president before him. The mayor, the chief, and the president were reasonable and experienced men. Which is why they decided to call off the search for Leighton. The Chicago papers had turned Leighton’s “disappearance” into “a tempest in a teapot.” The boy was a runaway, pure and simple. He’d used class rush as a way to leave home. He was tired of being told what to do by his mother. She’d ended his romance—so he’d run away to spite her. He’d be back.
A year passed.
No Leighton. No calls, no letters, no telegrams. Silence. No one smelled smoke.
Some people were sure Leighton had run away, that his family knew where he was, that they were too ashamed to admit he was alive—that he was still angry at his mother about Doris. Other people said they were sure Leighton was dead—he was a sissy. He’d committed suicide and his family knew all about it but were too ashamed to tell anyone.
J. Allan Mills, the student leader who’d told President Scott that Leighton had been abducted by reporters, withdrew from school. Some people said Mills had withdrawn to avoid being expelled—expelled because of extremely bad behavior while he was a member of a fraternity—the same fraternity to which Arthur Persinger had belonged. Mills’s withdrawal spawned rumors. Some people said that he’d carried a gun. Other people said that he’d been arrested for forgery. Some said he’d been arrested in California and was serving time in San Quentin. Others said he’d been arrested in Wyoming and was in the state penitentiary in Rawlins. Truth was: Mills was living in Berkeley under the name Paul Hutton and writing letters to people—especially young women—he barely knew, begging them for money, blaming his bad luck on something that had happened at Northwestern—“that terrible experience” he called it. No one knew what Mills meant by that. No one sent him any money.
Another eight months passed. Spring 1923.
Three carloads of freshmen chased a car full of sophomores through the streets of Evanston. They zigged and zagged and passed each other. They blazed down straightaways at forty-five, even fifty mph. It wasn’t class rush and it wasn’t a fraternity hazing—it was the end of April; the semester was almost over; freshmen were still chasing sophomores. One of those sophomores was a boy named Roscoe Conkling Fitch—a small, skinny, high-strung young man who happened to have been a friend of Leighton Mount. In fact, Roscoe had been in the crowd with Leighton, back in September 1921, when they’d tied ropes around their waists and had their faces painted with iodine. Roscoe remembered that Leighton had been “depressed . . . tired and worried” that night.9 He’d never seen Leighton after that.
Now Roscoe was in the backseat of a fast little Ford, being chased by a Haynes—a light, open car—packed with eleven freshmen. Roscoe said a boy named Leahy was driving the Haynes—fast but not very well.
“Leahy’s car was right behind us. We turned a corner, and he had to go straight on. He was going so fast, he couldn’t turn. We turned on two wheels, but his car couldn’t turn so he had to go around the block. . . . The two freshmen cars that were behind him had time to turn and follow us. We were going as fast as we could. . . . Leahy, coming up on us, was going fifty. . . . He came up behind us. . . . Leahy’s car was knocked over in a diagonal direction right into the oncoming car of this lady, Mrs. Williston.”10
Mrs. Williston wasn’t hurt. One of the boys in Leahy’s car was badly injured. Another boy, a seventeen-year-old freshman named Louis Aubere, died at the scene.
Chicago papers reported Aubere’s death as prominently as they’d reported Persinger’s ordeal and Leighton Mount’s disappearance. North-western’s dean called a meeting of student class leaders and fraternity presidents. The university’s official version—to be disseminated by them to everyone they knew—was that Aubere’s death was the result of a tragic automobile accident. An accident that had nothing to do with class feuds or fraternity hazings. Students were not to talk to reporters—the Chicago papers didn’t want to report the truth; they only wanted to sully the reputation of the university and the town of Evanston.
Aubere’s death came at a rather awkward time for Northwestern.
Walter Scott had accepted the school’s presidency knowing that his alma mater was in bad financial health: the school had been running an annual deficit of $100,00011 for years. The chairman of Northwestern’s board of trustees, a man named James Patten, had paid the school’s unpaid bills, every year, with his own money. Patten’s generosity had kept Northwestern solvent, but the school’s faculty were underpaid. Its undergraduates, particularly its women, were badly housed; its library was so small and so out-of-date that its holdings were scattered in a half dozen places around campus. The adjoining buildings that constituted the Chicago campus of Northwestern’s medical and law schools were overcrowded and in bad repair.
Bricks-and-mortar and salary money—construction and endowment money—had to be raised. James Patten agreed, but he wanted the money spent in Evanston. Other people on the board—people with less money than Patten—disagreed. Northwestern needed to expand its presence in Chicago. There was a fight. Patten lost. He resigned and took his checkbook with him.
The board took a calculated risk: the board knew that Northwestern’s new president was more than an academic. Before, during, and after the First World War, Scott had developed personnel tests that, as a consultant, he’d sold to corporate and military clients. The War Department used Scott’s tests to screen and select officers (men like Carl Wanderer); companies used Scott’s tests to screen and select salesmen and managers (men like the late D. J. Daugherty).
The U.S. Army made Scott a colonel; the French government made him a chevalier; the American Psychological Association made him its president. The books Scott wrote about the psychology of advertising became fundamental texts. They explained what is now—nearly one hundred years later—obvious: instincts and emotions can be used to sell almost anything to anyone (cigarettes to women; Packards to lunatics). Scott was smart, smooth, and thoroughly “modern.” If anyone could raise the new money Northwestern needed, it was Walter Dill Scott.
The board voted to authorize a $25 million capital campaign. It allotted $1.5 million of that to buy land to expand Northwestern’s Chicago “campus.”
The board turned out to be right:
Chicago, not Evanston, was where the money was. In 1920, just as Scott was coming into office, the McCormick cousins,12 coeditors of the Chicago Tribune, agreed to underwrite a journalism school to be named after their grandfather, Joseph Medill. In 1923, the widow of the retail and catalog magnate Montgomery Ward pledged the first $4 million of an $8 million gift to build a new Northwestern medical, dental, and research center in downtown Chicago. Scott prepared plans for a new football stadium, a new quadrangle of women’s dormitories, a new school of education, a new university library, a new . . .
Dead students, injured students, missing students—none of this was helpful. No one noticed the smell of smoke in the air.
One week after Louis Aubere died, a twelve-year-old Evanston boy named Henry Warren got into a fight with his sister and ran off in a huff. Henry had a hideout, a secret place where he went to be alone. Dim, safe, and private—the crawl space under the Lake Street pier.
“Saturday night,” Henry said, “I was playing ball with my sister . . . but she wouldn’t play fair, so I went down to the pier and crawled into the big hole that was there. I crawled along my stomach toward the shore until I found a piece of clothing and an old shoe. . . .”13
The pier where Henry went was the same pier where Leighton was last seen at three o’clock in the morning during class rush, back in September 1921. During the summer, Leighton used to go to that pier to swim—two or three miles every day. “Leighton was an expert swimmer,” one of his friends said.14 “Leighton knew that pier perfectly,” Doris Fuchs recalled. “It was on that pier that Leighton, many times, told me abut his theories of life, his philosophy . . .”15 The two would sit and talk and look out at the horizon. “He’d tell me of his troubles at home, of his desire to ‘get away from it all’ . . . from the material drawbacks of what . . . was his present form of life.”16
There were big, flat rocks on the ground where Henry crawled, dumped there to anchor the pier, after it had been built and towed into place, before its decking had been nailed and bolted down.
Henry thought the rags he found were part of an old bathing suit. Then, said Henry, “I saw a leg bone and some other bones. Then I saw a skull . . . I went right home and told my mother.”17
Henry’s mother didn’t believe him.
Henry insisted.
Mrs. Warren called the police.
She and Henry met them at the pier. An officer named George Petska crawled through Henry’s hole. Planks above, rocks below. A two-foot crawl space, from one end of the pier to the shore. Officer Petska crawled on his belly until Henry, peeking down through the cracks, told him to stop.
Officer Petska found what Henry found. And he found more.
Part of a skeleton with a length of rotted rope looped around its waist. A belt with a silver buckle, engraved with the initials L.M. A right shoe with part of a foot in it. A left shoe—with nothing in it.
The skeleton’s bones were scattered, but its skull and rib cage were intact. “There were five large stones,” Officer Petska said, “lying on the body, near the waist and ribs.” Not one of the stones weighed less than a hundred pounds. “There were three smaller stones,” Officer Petska said.18
More police came. Officers cut two planks, as thick as railway ties, out of the pier above the skeleton. Since the skeleton lay in Evanston—not Chicago—there was no coroner or coroner’s physician to examine the scene and document it before police lifted the rocks off the bones. An Evanston businessman named Harry Rideway watched the police as they did it. Rideway remembered the rocks: two big ones, at least a hundred pounds each, lay on top of the bones before they were disturbed.
LEIGHTON MOUNT FOUND DEAD
Skeleton Was Buried Under Evanston Pier.
Police Believe Him Hazing Victim.
The kindling that President Scott, Mayor Pearsons, and Chief Leggett had thrown into a pile two years before began to burn. Bright enough for everyone to see.
Scott rushed forward to put out the flames.
“Early in the evening, President Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University issued a statement that Leighton Mount was not a student routinely enrolled in the university at the time of his disappearance.”19
Someone—perhaps the school’s dean, perhaps the university’s “publicity man”—noticed that Scott had set his pants on fire.
“Later that night . . . President Scott issued another statement, saying that he had found Mount had been enrolled, but owing to his non payment of tuition, had temporarily lapsed in the relation of ‘enrolled student.’ ”20 The school’s bursar had probably told Scott that premature death was considered a valid excuse for late payment of fees.
Leighton’s mother was shown the skeleton’s silver belt buckle and its rags. “O, my boy, my boy,” she said.21 Leighton’s dentist, Dr. Ivey, was shown the skeleton’s teeth. “Yes, I am positive those are the teeth of Leighton Mount,” Dr. Ivey said. “Those are the same gold fillings I made. Aside from the record of my work, I have a distinct remembrance of just what work I did for Leighton and of the color and shape of his teeth.”22
As soon as Dr. Ivey identified Leighton’s teeth, President Scottannounced he would be making no further comments to the press. “All matters, from now on, have been placed in the hands of the attorney for the University, George P. Merrick.” Attorney Merrick issued a statement: “The University is very sorry and deeply regrets the death of Mount and we will do all we can to bring the guilty person to justice. . . . No effort will be made to shield any one, regardless of who is at fault. We have no one to protect.”23
Cook County Coroner Oscar Wolff didn’t believe Merrick. Neither did State’s Attorney Crowe. Evanston was in Cook County, Cook County was in Illinois—Wolff and his investigators, Crowe and his prosecutors had been waiting for a chance to bring their version of the rule of law to North-western’s company town.
Mr. Crowe had just left for a vacation when Leighton’s bones were found. Coroner Wolff asked Edgar Jones, Crowe’s first assistant (the same Edgar Jones who’d arranged for Harvey Church to make his final “I did it all by myself” confession), to assign a prosecutor and a police lieutenant to the case. Wolff convened a coroner’s jury and announced that he would lead the inquest.
Crowe ended his stay at a health resort “to give his personal attention” to the Mount case. “The attitude that University officials are reported to have taken immediately after Mount’s disappearance in September, 1921, and again, immediately after the finding of the skeleton . . . was puzzling, Mr. Crowe declared.”24
“Mobs are the same, whether composed of university students or underworld toughs,” Mr. Crowe said. “Here, where university students are involved . . . justice has been hampered. . . . There is one way to find out how this unfortunate student met his death, and why his body was concealed beneath a pile of rocks under a pier: That is to go through every fraternity and class group of students, and by a process of elimination, find out who has guilty knowledge of the killing.
“I am going to separate the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the chaff, line up the good, honest, upright students . . . on one side. . . . Those on the other can expect little consideration. Every student who has left college since the fatal class rush will be traced and questioned. If the guilty ones are fugitives, we will need to learn it as quickly as possible—we will, too, if Northwestern does its part.”25
Despite the rocks on Leighton’s bones, student leaders—football stars, class presidents, and fraternity presidents, the same leaders who’d been told what to say after Louis Aubere’s death—spread the news that Leighton had, indeed, killed himself. He’d drunk iodine, jumped into the lake, and drowned. His body had been washed beneath the pier. “Wave burial” was the phrase well-informed students began to use.
The chief justice of the Cook County Criminal Court, Michael McKinley, gave new directions to a grand jury, already in session: Its new task, McKinley said, was to determine whether Mount had killed himself or been killed. If Mount had been killed, the jury was to determine whether he had died by accident or by intentional act. McKinley briefed the jury about “accessory after the fact.” If the jury had reason to believe that Mount had been killed by others—accidentally or intentionally—it also needed to determine whether anyone had helped Mount’s killers conceal his body.
Kate Trostell had gone missing in December 1922; Arthur Foster always claimed she’d killed herself. The judge who’d finally blocked Arthur’s release, the grand jury that, eventually, brought a murder charge against Arthur—nearly everyone in Chicago had read reports about the Trostell case, day after day, for months before Leighton’s bones were found. Less than a week after Henry Warren crawled under the Lake Street pier, Arthur Foster’s murder trial began. Stories about watery graves, mysteries of homicide or suicide, the disappearance of the living and the discovery of the dead—all this was in the minds of those who read about and those who investigated Leighton’s death.
The grand jury began to issue subpoenas.
Conference rooms, meeting rooms, jury deliberation rooms, empty offices, and antechambers in the Criminal Court building began to fill with groups of tweedy students, subpoenaed twenty or thirty at a time, then questioned, one by one. Some students complained they’d be expelled for missing classes, others chanted varsity fight songs as they waited. None of them believed Leighton had been murdered.
J. Allan Mills, “the red haired leader of the freshman class,” was traced to Akron, Ohio, where he was found to be working in the rubber shops of the B. F. Goodrich Company. Akron police arrested Mills and held him until two assistant state’s attorneys, sent by Crowe, could depose him in jail. Mills’s father told him to keep his mouth shut and fight extradition. Mills decided he had nothing to hide: He jumped out a window, climbed into a waiting car, and drove straight to Chicago to tell Mr. Crowe his story.
Mills reached Chicago the same day jury selection began for Arthur Foster’s trial.
The grand jury issued subpoenas for Doris Fuchs, Chief of Police Leggett, and Mr. and Mrs. Mount.
Leighton’s mother spent two days telling the jury about her boy. Doris Fuchs changed her story about her relationship with Leighton several times: she finally settled on a five-month courtship, no kisses, long conversations about Christian Science—followed by the intervention of Leighton’s mother. Doris said she didn’t mind: Leighton was only eighteen; she was twenty-five; she was fed up with working as a nanny; she planned to leave town, anyway. In her opinion, Leighton was “a queer, peculiar, shut-in” young man. She’d never loved him.
J. Allan Mills put on a suit and went to see Mr. Crowe. He’d never known Leighton, personally, he said. Yes, he’d helped look for Leighton after he disappeared. Yes, he’d gone to see President Scott to warn him about the Chicago papers. And why was that? Because a reporter had offered him a bribe to stage a dunking for a photographer. Scott had discouraged and dissuaded Mills from doing anything more to find Leighton. As to all those rumors: Mills said he’d never carried a gun, and never served time—in San Quentin or anywhere else. He’d left school of his own volition. The “terrible night”? He was ashamed of how he’d behaved. It was a personal matter that had nothing to do with Leighton Mount.
Crowe told the two assistant state’s attorneys he’d sent to Akron to go on to West Virginia to depose other students. Arthur Persinger was one of them. Back in Chicago, Chief Leggett took the stand and confessed to falsifying police records. He said Mayor Pearsons and President Scott forced him to do it. Mr. Crowe announced he was prepared to subpoena North-western’s board of trustees.
Evanston’s commissioner of public works, a man named William Blanchard, was subpoenaed. Blanchard had supervised the construction of the Lake Street pier.
“Mount’s body could not have been washed under that pier; it is physically impossible,” Blanchard said. “The pier is what we call a breakwater. It was built in the summer of 1921 and floated to its present position. Rocks were then dropped into it until it was full and thus permanently anchored in place.
“The pier was completed on August 29, 1921, four weeks before Mount’s death. In early September—two weeks before Mount disappeared—I inspected it. It was solid and there was no hole in the planking. There was no room for a body to wash in.”26
Two local boys—the Cook brothers—were subpoenaed. They’d known Leighton, and had spoken to him at three o’clock in the morning, at the end of the class rush. They’d joined the search for him the next day. “We went up and down the shore,” said Thomas Cook, the older of the two. “I remember we went out to the Lake Street pier where the skeleton was found a few days ago. I remember there was a hole in it—a hole that was just about where [the police] chopped the hole, now . . . It was as if some loose or rotted boards had been pulled away.”27
President Scott’s son, John, was subpoenaed. Elizabeth “Honey” Sullivan, the leader of an Evanston gang of “sheik bandits,” was subpoenaed. John Scott said his father had ordered him not to participate in class rush. Honey Sullivan denied that any of her gang had used freshmen as “punching bags” during the melee.
Three other Evanston boys came forward, on their own, to say that before Leighton disappeared, they’d chopped their own hole in the Lake Street pier. Not the hole the Cook brothers noticed—but another one, farther from shore. They’d wedged a board in it, for diving. “We had to move our board several times . . . we chopped around [our hole] because [our board] kept pulling up [planks].”28 Nine months later—in the spring of 1922—other boys widened the hole so they could duck under the pier to change into bathing suits.29 That was the hole that Henry used when he ran off, after his sister had cheated at baseball.
Two holes. Much confusion.
“Surely this calls for an explanation from men experienced in murder mysteries,” declared Mr. Crowe.
He summoned his experts:
Chief of detectives, Michael Hughes, and homicide detective—now Lieutenant—John Norton (the same John Norton who’d traced the serial number of Carl Wanderer’s Colt .45).
Crowe sent Hughes and Norton to Evanston to examine the Lake Street pier.
They measured the holes. “Hole No. 1”—the hole made to wedge a diving board, then enlarged so boys could wriggle under the pier to change clothes—was 20 inches wide. The other hole—”Hole No. 2”—the one the Cook brothers noticed—was a jagged diamond shape, no more than six inches wide.
“All other possibilities being eliminated, we must conclude,” reported Hughes, “that it was Hole No. 1 that Leighton Mount was lowered through to his sand and stone grave. Other conditions being taken into consideration, it is logical to assume that this was done on the night of his death, which, I take it, was the night of Northwestern’s class rush.”
Hughes chose Hole No. 1, not because he was sure it was 20 inches wide back in September 1921, but because Hole No. 2 was too small for anything but a cat or a rat to scamper through.
“There is barely room,” continued Hughes, “between the rocks and the underside of the pier planks to permit a person, wriggling on his stomach, [to reach] Hole No. 2 [adjacent to where Henry Warren found Leighton’s skeleton, and where Evanston police cut their own hole to extract Leighton’s bones]. If removal of [Leighton Mount’s] body was accomplished before rigor mortis set in, one or two slender persons could probably have disposed of the corpse in ten minutes.
“That settles that. It could have been done; it was done, precisely in the manner I have outlined and in no other.
“Now we take up: ‘Who did it?’
“Lieutenant Norton and I agree that the stones said to have been piled on top of the skeleton render any suicide theory absurd. The first mistake was made in permitting the Evanston police to remove the skeleton. . . . A photograph should have been taken . . . before anything was done. . . . A coroner’s physician should have been the first to touch the bones. . . . The Evanston police made a mess of it by taking the [skeleton] out in pieces.”
Lieutenant Norton added:
“I am sure it was a body that was put there, not a skeleton. . . . I am also of the theory that it was the work of frightened students.”
Hughes recommended: “Every student then in both freshman and sophomore classes [should] be closely questioned, no exception made.”30
President Scott testified before the grand jury the same day Hughes and Norton reported to Mr. Crowe.
Mr. Scott made it plain that Northwestern was blameless—and so was he. He and the university were bystanders to the Mount family’s misfortune. He knew only what Mrs. Mount, in her agitated state, had told him. And what, asked Judge McKinley, had Mrs. Mount said? Mrs. Mount, said Scott, had told him that she feared her son had taken his own life. She’d hoped he’d been abducted—but she feared he’d killed himself. President Scott said he’d tried to calm Mrs. Mount—but after listening to her he’d also come to fear the worst.
“Campus lies! Campus lies!” said Mrs. Mount, when Scott’s testimony was read to her. “I did everything President Scott told me—but now, I’m going to fight to the finish. I kept quiet for they kept telling me my son would come back. But now I know Leighton was murdered. Now that I’ve learned the things Mr. Scott told the grand jury. . . . I’m through with protecting him and the university. . . . The men responsible for Leighton’s death and for the failure to solve his disappearance are going to have to take the blame.”31
The members of the grand jury went to Evanston to examine the pier for themselves. The jury saw that the pier had been built with heavy timbers; it had been closed on all sides, bolted together, then ballasted with rocks. There was no way anything but sand, pebbles, and refuse could have washed into it.
Crowe asked that subpoenas be issued for forty-one students who’d left Northwestern within four months of Leighton’s disappearance. Mrs. Mount told Mr. Crowe that President Scott had called her, less than a week after Leighton disappeared, to tell her, in confidence, that he had expelled sixteen students who’d been unusually rough and rowdy during class rush. Scott had asked Mrs. Mount to keep the expulsions secret. He said that any publicity might jeopardize the students’ chances of being admitted to other colleges, elsewhere. Crowe ordered his investigators to follow up on what Mrs. Mount told him. Northwestern’s registrar said he had no record of the expulsion of any group of sixteen students. When Crowe’s men asked to see the records, the registrar refused.
Crowe’s investigators had questioned more than a hundred students by the time they brought in Roscoe Conkling Fitch. Fitch was one of the sophomores involved in the auto accident that had killed Louis Aubere. Fitch seems to have been waiting like an actor, listening for his cue. Back in Michigan, Roscoe’s father had been a county prosecutor—a big fish in a small pond. Everyone back in Ludington was proud of Roscoe—knew him and admired him. “He was one of the smartest boys we’ve ever had,” one of Roscoe’s teachers said. Everyone in town thought Roscoe would follow in his father’s footsteps. Follow—and then surpass him. “Everyone expects Roscoe to be a great corporation lawyer some day.”32
The discovery of Leighton’s bones only a week after Louis Aubere’s death—the two deaths had sounded like drum rolls and trumpet flourishes to Roscoe—portents of a brilliant and dramatic legal career. Roscoe had stood beside Leighton, been chased by Aubere: Roscoe was ready. Nervous but ready.
“In a story full of twists and quirks, tears and laugher, [Roscoe Conkling Fitch] last night confessed to State Assistant Attorneys that he knew all the details of the disappearance and killing of Leighton Mount.”33 Secret conferences between student leaders and President Walter Scott, carefully prepared press releases that were meant to serve as secret scripts—Roscoe told investigators “an amazing story” of cover-ups that began with Leighton’s disappearance and continued with Aubere’s death. “Fitch did not vary through long hours of grilling. He spoke frankly about these hush-up policies without hesitation . . .every effort to twist him failed.”34
Eight times over the course of twelve hours, Fitch seemed on the verge of “telling all” about Leighton’s death; eight times, Roscoe drew back like a hero in a melodrama. “I dare not talk,” Fitch said, “for I have been warned by the men at the top to keep quiet and I must do it. . . .”35
“Fitch’s story kept a full force working at the State’s Attorney’s office until after midnight. . . . Robert E. Crowe himself was called into a telephone conference by his assistants. . . .”36
“I know all about the Mount case,” Fitch kept saying. “I could tell you everything, but I am pledged not to . . . you’ll never find out . . . the other students who know are pledged to silence and they’ll never break their pledge.”
“Who pledged you?” one of Crowe’s men asked.
“One of the most prominent students in school.”
“Who was he? . . .Was he John Scott [President Scott’s son]?”
“I cannot answer,” Fitch said. “I dare not . . . He told me never to mention his name. . . . He said to follow President Scott’s testimony before the grand jury; that the University would come out on top and that I’d be protected in everything. . . . I must keep quiet about the Mount case. . . . If I don’t, I’ll lose my credits and be kicked out of school.”37
Halfway through the questioning, Crowe’s men gave Roscoe his dinner. The food changed him. Tears and tremors changed to embarrassed smiles.
“I don’t know anything about the Mount case,” Roscoe now said. “It was the Aubere case I was telling you about. . . . I’ll tell you the truth about Aubere if you’ll protect me.”
Crowe’s office issued subpoenas for the freshmen who were in the car with Aubere. Fitch’s histrionics—his accusations and retractions—seemed to have embarrassed Mr. Crowe.
“Reports that this office is about to drop the investigation and that no progress has been made are false,” said Mr. Crowe. “Reports given to me by my assistants show that someone is covering up and that some persons are protected. We are going to the bottom and we will find out who is doing the covering and why. . . . The investigation is far from over. The investigation . . . will go through to the finish. . . . If persons who have been withholding information think they are fooling anyone, they are wrong.”38
A day after Roscoe ended his fan dance, the jury in the Kate Trostell/Arthur Foster case reached a verdict: Arthur was a brute and a murderer. He deserved to die.
Mr. Crowe began to quietly and privately question people about Leighton’s life and death. Wholesale subpoenas and witnesses who played to an audience had been of no help. Crowe became more selective and more circumspect.
Crowe discovered that before Leighton disappeared, he’d sought the advice and counsel of a Christian Science practitioner named Herman Steinborn. Crowe asked Steinborn about those counseling sessions. Crowe also asked Dr. Clarence Neymann, former director of Chicago Psychopathic Hospital, to give his professional opinion about Leighton’s mental and emotional state before he disappeared—and about the character and veracity of such witnesses as Roscoe Fitch and Henry Warren. In addition, Crowe interviewed Doris Fuchs in private. And he carefully questioned Henry Warren, out of public view.
Dr. Neymann interviewed Roscoe Fitch for two hours, then made an evaluation: “A sphinx without a secret,” was the way Neymann described Roscoe. “A publicity seeker, puerile, a boy . . . enchanted with the . . . limelight, who now sees that the limelight has its disagreeable sides.”39
Herman Steinborn, the Christian Science practitioner, told Crowe about the conversation he’d had with Leighton on September 5, 1921.
“He came professionally,” said Steinborn, “my name having been given to him by a friend. He complained of a severe headache in the front of his forehead and asked my assistance in obtaining relief. . . . I let him do most of the talking.
“Leighton said he was madly, insanely in love with Doris Fuchs, but she looked on him only as a friend. . . . He said he was in constant trouble at home. . . . He was tired of school . . . and wanted to give up his college work. . . .
“Leighton said his mother had interfered in his friendship with Doris . . . I remember one phrase he used: ‘The only bright spot in my life is Doris.’ ”40
When Crowe spoke with Doris herself, she told him what she’d already told the grand jury: Leighton was a friend; they talked about philosophy and religion; he often talked about how unhappy he was at home; he talked about suicide on at least two occasions. “When Leighton disappeared, I was certain he had carried out his threats.”
Crowe asked Doris, Steinborn, and Neymann two questions:
Was Leighton the type of young man who’d run away—and stay away—from home? Was Leighton the type of person who might kill himself? Doris and Neymann thought Leighton was so unhappy that he was as likely to have killed himself as to have run away. Steinborn disagreed: Leighton was deeply discontented, but not suicidal.
Finally, Crowe spoke with Henry Warren.
Henry surprised him. There were no stones, Henry said. No stones—and not much that looked like a skeleton. Leighton’s bones were scattered; his belt and its initialed buckle were off to one side. There were rocks, everywhere, said Henry. But Leighton’s bones were on them, not under them.
Henry told this to Mr. Crowe, in private, then he told it to the grand jury, in public.
SECRET MOUNT QUIZ IS BARRED. NEW EVIDENCE
Suicide Clews Are Brought Forward.41
Crowe asked Dr. Neymann to interview and evaluate Henry, to examine him as he’d examined Roscoe Fitch. “A lad of unusual brightness,” said the doctor. Henry’s “memory could be depended upon to report detail with accuracy.”42
Chief Hughes and Lieutenant Norton were right about only one thing: The Evanston police had “made a mess of it.” Fabricated police reports followed by fabricated evidence.
Only this was certain: Leighton’s skull, his teeth, and his belt buckle had been discovered under the pier. Coroner’s physicians had been able to make a skeleton from the bones that had been collected. There had been a body under the pier; it was likely to have been Leighton Mount’s.
After a four-week investigation, Crowe and Wolff knew no more (but no less) than they had before they’d begun issuing subpoenas: Northwestern was a very private school; the police in Evanston were not to be trusted.
The coroner’s jury heard much the same evidence as the grand jury. Coroner Wolff led his jury to a verdict. To do that, Wolff found it necessary to replace one of his jury’s five members. The man Wolff fired had been foolish enough to post a $10,000 reward, payable to anyone who found Leighton Mount alive. The man had done this despite new evidence presented by Evanston police officer George Petska. “There were seven or eight rocks on top of the bones,” Petska told Wolff’s jury. Seven or eight rocks “weighing from fifty to a hundred pounds each. . . . It would have been impossible for the water to wash the rocks in that position.”43 No one doubted Officer Petska. Stones were stones; a policeman was more trustworthy than a twelve-year-old boy.
“We the jury find that Leighton Mount came to his death on or about the 22nd of September, 1921, and that his body was found under the pier at the foot of Lake Street on April 30, 1923 at about 6:00 pm.
“We are unable to determine how or in what manner he met his death, but we are of the opinion that he came to his death at the hands of some unknown person or persons. . . . We recommend that . . . if possible such person or persons be apprehended and held on the charge of murder to the grand jury. . . .”
Three days passed.
The grand jury milled around like infantry at a crossroads. Murder or suicide? Suicide or murder? No one had a map.
Three days passed.
Mr. Crowe got a telegram.
It came from Clifton, Arizona. From a Mr. D. H. Rouw. Mr. Rouw described himself as “a traveling representative of a San Francisco collection house.” A traveling bill collector?
“ . . . did not know I was sought as witness in Mount case until informed by local sheriff . . .
“I witnessed affair in Evanston in 1921,” wrote Mr. Rouw. “Have good information and will assist all I can. If my presence is desired, wire transportation and expense funds at once by Western Union.”
Crowe ordered his assistant prosecutor Charles Wharton (the same Charles Wharton who, as an assistant state’s attorney, had praised Harvey Church’s fine mind, unspoiled, rustic health, and splendid memory) to go to Arizona to depose Rouw.
Rouw was so eager to talk that, after he telegrammed Crowe, he told his story to two Arizona newspapers. Rouw said that, back in September 1921, he and another traveling man were driving along the lake, up in Evanston, when they noticed students lowering a body into a hole in a swimming pier. It happened “just as the sun was setting.”
Rouw corrected himself: Come to think of it, he hadn’t been with anyone when he saw what he saw. He’d been alone, walking along the pier, enjoying the breeze, “late in the evening.”
“I noticed a queer-looking party ahead of me. I watched them idly for a while. . . . I was struck by the fact that they seemed to be carrying something heavy. . . .
“I drew a little closer and saw it was a man’s body. At first, I paid little attention . . .believing it was probably . . . a party of celebrants, carrying a drunken companion . . . But soon I saw them stop. This interested me. I did not want to seem to interfere. . . . I stopped at a discreet distance.
“I saw them lower the body through a hole in the pier. . . . Four of them lowered the body while perhaps fifteen others stood around. They all looked and acted very scared. . . . All of them wore funny looking college caps. . . .”
Rouw said the students noticed him. They approached him. Surrounded him. Told him to keep his mouth shut.
Rouw said he went to the police. They told him not to worry.
“ ‘If we investigated every time the boys up at the University played a prank we’d have no time to protect the citizens and keep law and order in Evanston.’ ” Rouw said the police officer had smiled as he said this.
“I didn’t know, of course, that a man had been killed there. If I had, I certainly would have protested more strongly. But I had read of college pranks and blindfolding and all that sort of thing, and I dismissed it from my mind.”
Rouw said he’d stood so close to the students on the pier—and they’d stood so close to him when they’d threatened him—that he was sure he could identify them. “One of them had bright red hair,” Rouw said. “One of them was fat.”44
When Prosecutor Wharton arrived in Clifton, he hired a court stenographer to come with him when he went to see Mr. Rouw.
The stenographer wrote down Rouw’s story as he told it. Wharton read the transcript, then asked Rouw to sign it. He warned Mr. Rouw: Once you sign it, you signify it’s true. If it’s not true—you’ll be guilty of perjury.
“Well men,” said Rouw, “I don’t believe I will sign.”
Wharton was surprised. “But you said it’s true,” he said to Rouw. “You’ll go with me to Chicago and tell the grand jury what you’ve told me here.”
“Well,” said Rouw, “I guess I might as well admit that I was lying. I framed the story to get a free ride back to Chicago. It’s all a hoax.”45
Wharton returned to Chicago.
Judge Michael McKinley dismissed his grand jury.
Mr. and Mrs. Mount buried their son’s skull and bones.
No new witnesses came forward. No suspects were ever identified. Leighton’s case went cold.
Years passed.
Walter Dill Scott retired in 1940. He’d raised more than $40 million (equivalent to ten times that amount today) for his alma mater. A grateful university named its new student center—its student union—after him. Scott Hall. It was the right thing to do. The man who talked to millionaires was known for his common touch. Students loved Mr. Scott’s openness, his tolerance, the interest he took in each and every one of them. As individuals.